Apologetics Report:
Religion under a secular
assault
Washington Times
Religion
under a secular assault (Washington Times, 050413)
Why
Bush threatens secularism (Washington Times, 050414)
Believers
aim to ‘reclaim’ America (Washington Times, 050415)
==============================
SPECIAL REPORT ON WASHINGTON TIMES:
By Julia Duin
Special Report: First of three parts.
Oral arguments were to begin before the U.S. Supreme Court on one of the most litigated questions in American law: Should the Ten Commandments be displayed on government property?
Outside, protesters sang hymns and held up signs proclaiming “The 10 Commandments: The way to live your life.” A few feet away, a larger group clustered around Ellen Birch, a member of American Atheists, who describes herself as a descendant of Thomas Jefferson.
“A favorite claim of fundamentalists,” she told anyone listening, is that America is “indebted to the Bible and Christianity for our laws.”
Not so, Miss Birch says.
“State support of a religion leads to corruption within both government and religion,” she says, adding that Jefferson himself said, “The wall of separation between church and state was absolutely essential in a free society.”
The clash of cultures, between spiritual and secular America, was on full public display.
Secularists such as Miss Birch cite Jefferson’s wall in their fight to exclude God from public life, proposing to ban creches at city hall, Christmas carols in public schools, graduation prayers at colleges and grace over meals at military academies -- as well as the more than 4,000 stone and concrete testaments to the Ten Commandments across the country.
They’re part of a network of organizations that shares logistics, troops, board members and funding sources and includes radical feminists, humanists, atheists and liberal Jewish and Christian groups. Four organizations furnish most of the leadership.
The oldest and best-known is the
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), whose Kentucky chapter is a plaintiff in
the two cases before the Supreme Court. The others are Americans United for
Separation of Church and State, People for the American Way (PFAW) and the
Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF). The latter two filed
friends-of-the-court briefs in support of the lawsuits.
Monumental argument
Lawyers argued the two cases -- Van Orden v. Perry and McCreary County, Ky. v. ACLU of Kentucky -- in a Supreme Court chamber surrounded by engraved images of the Ten Commandments.
The carved Commandments on the grounds of the Texas Capitol in Austin is excessive, Duke University Law School professor Erwin Chemerinsky argued on behalf of Thomas Van Orden, a homeless, disbarred lawyer.
“It’s the most powerful and profound religious message that this court has ever considered on government property,” Mr. Chemerinsky said. “Here you have a monument that proclaims not only there is a God, but God has dictated rules of behavior for those who follow him or her.”
The justices appeared unimpressed.
“I don’t know whether that’s any more profound or ultrareligious than the prayer the chaplain gives every day in the House,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said.
Several justices noted the frieze overlooking the chamber depicting Moses with the two tablets upon which the Bible says God proclaimed His laws to the Israelites. But the frieze, Mr. Chemerinsky argued, includes 17 lawgivers besides Moses, and American society is too fragmented to agree on a single source of divine revelation.
“Imagine the Muslim or the Buddhist who walks into the [Texas] State Supreme Court to have his or her case heard,” he said. “That person will see this monument and realize it’s not his or her government.”
Justice Antonin Scalia injected a little humor, saying, “Probably 90 percent of the American people believe in the Ten Commandments, and I’ll bet you probably 85 percent of them couldn’t tell you what the 10 are.”
Though many Americans cannot recite the Ten Commandments as set out in the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy, an Associated Press survey in February found that 76 percent of the 1,000 people polled approved of displaying them on government property.
Opponents say such displays violate the establishment clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
The intent, scholars say, was to protect Americans from an imposed state religion, guaranteeing the right to worship God however they pleased.
‘Dirty little secret’
The ACLU, Americans United, PFAW, FFRF and their allies have filed hundreds of lawsuits since the 1960s on the grounds of “separation of church and state.” The phrase, which Jefferson first used in a letter to an association of Connecticut Baptists, appears nowhere in the Constitution.
A federal appeals court, citing the “separation” concept, barred a cross on federal land in the Mojave Desert. The San Diego City Council voted March 8 to remove a 43-foot cross atop the Mount Soledad War Memorial, ending a 15-year battle with an atheist backed by the ACLU. A lawsuit by Michael Newdow, another California atheist, to remove the phrase “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance was dismissed by the Supreme Court on a technicality in June.
The faithful accuse the “anti-Christian soldiers” of disproportionately targeting Judeo-Christian symbols while ignoring other religious symbols.
In 2003, the ACLU urged the National Park Service to remove plaques inscribed with Bible verses from three overlooks at the Grand Canyon but did not protest the names of park buttes -- Brahma Temple, Vishnu Temple, Shiva Temple, Osiris Temple and others -- commemorating Hindu and Egyptian deities.
ACLU President Nadine Strossen says her group correctly ignored the rest.
“Most people would not see those as religious, but as religious art,” she says in an interview. “Would a reasonable observer see those as a government endorsement of religion? If it’s such an exotic religion that most people wouldn’t know what the symbol is?”
Ms. Strossen declines to characterize her religious beliefs. She describes the ACLU as supported by “rabbis, ministers, priests and other religious leaders who recognize that government involvement is as dangerous to religion as it is to a diverse, pluralistic society.”
Litigation and protest has split communities, sometimes inviting sectarian hard feelings. School districts across the country have banned Christmas carols, Nativity scenes and -- in Texas -- even the traditional Christmas colors of red and green at a holiday party in an elementary school.
“I blame my fellow Jews for the situation,” columnist Burt Prelutsky wrote in the Los Angeles Times last year. “When it comes to pushing the multicultural, anti-Christian agenda, you find Jewish judges, Jewish journalists and the American Civil Liberties Union at the forefront. The dirty little secret in America is that anti-Semitism is no longer a problem in society -- it’s been replaced by a rampant anti-Christianity.”
Religious roots
The Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), a group that advocates religious liberty, advances the view that Christianity is singled out for challenges.
The ADF, founded in Scottsdale, Ariz., in 1993 by leaders of 30 conservative Christian organizations, tracks “anti-Christmas” cases filed by the ACLU. Alan Sears, its president, argues that the ACLU uses the courts to make policy.
“The future of America,” he says, rests on legal battles mounted against the ACLU.
His group organized a “Christmas project” last year, writing instructions on what schools legally can and cannot do to mark the holiday, then sending the list to 6,740 school districts.
“The pendulum has swung so far into this notion of being able to remove only the Christmas holiday because that might hypothetically offend someone,” ADF staff attorney Joshua Carden says. “People are sick of it.”
Polls typically show that poor countries are more religious than rich. America is the exception. A Gallup survey of 1,001 adults in late March, for example, shows that 84 percent identified “with a Christian religion.”
The nation’s history is steeped in religious faith. Christopher Columbus thought his sail to the unknown New World in 1492 was a divine calling, and colonists framed the Revolutionary War in religious terms, referring to themselves as “God’s elect.” The British were the “anti-Christ.”
The Declaration of Independence acknowledged the Judeo-Christian deity in appealing to “Nature’s God,” “Divine Providence” and “the Supreme Judge of the world.”
Every presidential inaugural speech since George Washington’s in 1789 either has invoked God or referred to religious faith. By 1830, Alexis de Tocqueville, the French author of “Democracy in America,” declared that in this raw nation religion had become “indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions.”
These institutions came under duress during World War I, second only to the Vietnam War as “the most unpopular war in American history,” Samuel Walker wrote in his book on the ACLU, “In Defense of American Liberties.”
In the tumultuous years that followed the end of World War I, pacifists, anarchists, socialists, communists and suffragettes joined to fight what they regarded as the evils of industrial capitalism and government repression of free speech.
Birth of the ACLU
Roger Baldwin, a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, a Chicago-based radical labor group, founded the ACLU. He was a Unitarian, a denomination that believes in God but not in the divinity of Christ.
When Mr. Baldwin refused to join the military in 1918, he went to prison for a year as a conscientious objector. Soon after Mr. Baldwin’s release, on the second anniversary of the Russian Revolution, U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer jailed thousands of anarchists and labor activists for suspected communist activities.
A month after 249 foreign-born activists were deported to Russia in December 1919, Mr. Baldwin organized the ACLU. The group’s early causes included defending John Scopes, arrested in Dayton, Tenn., in 1925 for teaching the theory of evolution in defiance of state law.
“The ACLU was the legal arm of militant labor,” says Bill Donohue, founder of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, whose 1980 doctoral thesis examined the group. “From the beginning, they were tied to the politics of the left. It was hard-core left. They justified Stalinism.”
Mr. Baldwin visited Stalin’s brutal police state in 1923 and 1927 and praised it in a book, “Liberty Under the Soviets.” But he disassociated himself from communism when Stalin signed a nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany, and the next year, the ACLU expelled its top communist board member, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.
Mr. Baldwin had made his peace with the U.S. government when he resigned as ACLU director in 1949. In fact, two years earlier Gen. Douglas MacArthur appointed him as consultant on civil liberties in Japan and Korea. He continued espousing left-wing causes until his death in 1981.
The ACLU courted controversy during the 1950s and ‘60s, even defending the American Nazi Party. When the Nazis planned a march in the heavily Jewish Chicago suburb of Skokie, Ill. in 1977, the ACLU went to court in support of their right -- however abhorrent -- to do so. The decision cost the organization $300,000 in donations, and its membership plunged from 275,000 to 200,000. Such longtime allies as the American Jewish Congress deplored ACLU involvement.
Skokie was home of the largest U.S. concentration of Holocaust survivors, and many Jews saw the march as insulting the memory of the 6 million Jews exterminated by the German Nazis. Aryeh Neier resigned as executive director of the ACLU and described the dilemma of majority will and minority rights in his 1979 book, “Defending My Enemy.”
“The alternative to freedom is power,” wrote Mr. Neier, who was born in Nazi Germany. “If I could be certain that I could wipe out Nazism and all comparable threats to my safety by the exercise of power, perhaps I would be tempted to choose that course. But we Jews have little power. As a Jew, therefore, concerned with my own survival and the survival of the Jews -- the two being inextricably linked -- I want restraints placed on power.”
Mr. Neier, now 78, assumed the presidency of liberal philanthropist George Soros’ Open Society Institute in 1998, a New York-based foundation that describes itself as promoting pluralism in democratic societies.
Mr. Neier’s fear of a powerful majority imposing its will on a nonconsenting minority moved the ACLU to oppose mandatory school prayer in the 1962 Supreme Court case Engel v. Vitale and oppose Bible reading in public schools as well in 1963’s Abington v. Schempp. It was paired with the more famous case, Murray v. Curlett, filed by atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair.
The Supreme Court’s rulings in all three cases, Mr. Walker wrote in his ACLU biography, “completed the process of disestablishing Protestantism as the nation’s unofficial religion.”
Making a mark
Faith in all forms of authority underwent severe tests during the cultural ferment of the 1960s and ‘70s.
“The ACLU saw freedom of religion as something they wanted to put their mark on,” the Catholic League’s Mr. Donohue says. “They take the strict separationist position: ‘The more we are separated from religion, the better off we are.’ “
With $48 million in annual revenue, the ACLU, now with 400,000 members in 50 state affiliates, counts $125 million in net assets. It gave $57,830 to Democratic candidates last year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The largest contribution ($18,730) went to John Kerry. No ACLU money went to Republicans.
The ACLU’s Ms. Strossen argues that separating church and state is in the interest of American pluralism.
“Many people with deeply held religious beliefs don’t want the government to interfere by having government sponsorship,” she says. “We have the most religiously vibrant country in the entire world, and all observers say the reason for it is the First Amendment with its nonestablishment clause.”
What of ACLU members themselves?
“We have people of all denominations in the ACLU,” Ms. Strossen says. “On the [83-member] national board alone, there are several ministers. The vice chairman of the national advisory council is a Catholic priest.”
This vice chairman is the Rev. Robert Drinan, a liberal Jesuit professor at Georgetown University who served in Congress during the 1970s and as an adviser to the Kerry presidential campaign. But when Father Drinan was dean of the law school at Boston College from 1956 to 1970, he accused the ACLU of magnifying the establishment clause to the detriment of religious liberties.
Conservative critics of the ACLU argue that it continues to use such tactics. Some of these critics have formed their own organizations to contend against it, beginning with the founding of the Moral Majority in 1979 by the Rev. Jerry Falwell.
Mr. Falwell and other Christian conservatives, buoyed by Ronald Reagan’s election as president in 1980, mounted bids in 12 states to reintroduce school prayer. Alarmed, the ACLU ran an ad in the New York Times proclaiming, “If The Moral Majority Has Its Way, You’d Better Start Praying.”
In 1990, the Rev. Pat Robertson, the religious broadcaster, founded the American Center for Law and Justice to challenge the ACLU in the courts.
Ms. Strossen brushes aside the relevance of personal faith to the organization’s goals. “The only beliefs we have,” she said of ACLU members, “are pro-civil liberties beliefs.”
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By Julia Duin
Special Report: Second of three parts.
The weekend before President Bush’s second inauguration, 60 humanists, atheists and ethical culturalists gathered at a hotel just off Dupont Circle for an “emergency meeting” organized by the American Humanist Association.
“The situation is now as bad as we’ll ever see it,” Roy Speckhardt, the group’s deputy director, says afterward.
He predicts that Mr. Bush’s evangelical Christian views would be folded into government policy on judicial appointees, abortion, social services and other issues.
“A slim [election] victory is being interpreted as a mandate on moral issues, so we are concerned,” Mr. Speckhardt says.
One of the 20 organizations represented at the pre-inaugural strategy session was a group from Madison, Wis., called the Freedom from Religion Foundation. Group founder Anne Nicol Gaylor, 78, unable to attend because of failing eyesight, sent son-in-law Dan Barker in her place.
The foundation is the mom-and-pop
operation among the four main organizations — the others being the American
Civil Liberties Union, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and
People for the American Way — that are leading the legal battles to push God
from the public square and create a nation in man’s image.
In 28 years, Mrs. Gaylor’s foundation has filed about 25 lawsuits in addition to complaints that never made it to court. An early victory halted the 122-year history of prayers at University of Wisconsin graduation ceremonies in 1976 because of a complaint lodged by Mrs. Gaylor’s daughter, Annie Laurie Gaylor, then a student. She is now the co-director of the foundation with her husband, Mr. Barker. In 1985, their group managed to stop the university football team’s pre-game prayers.
“Sometimes all you have to do is complain,” Mr. Barker says. “It’s better that way, and cheaper. She asked the school why there’s prayer, and they said, ‘Gee, why is there?’ “
Christianity and other religions
are essentially harmful, in the view of the foundation, which claims 5,000
members, most of them atheists who make small donations.
“There is complete scorn on the part of the current administration as to the separation of church and state,” the elder Mrs. Gaylor says in an interview. “There has never been any less respect in Washington for church-state separation, even though church-state separation is one of the things that made our country possible in the first place.”
Many Christians and others of faith, however, see a growing threat that Mrs. Gaylor and her allies are intent on loosing the nation from its Judeo-Christian moorings.
Building the wall
On New Year’s Day 1802, President Jefferson wrote a letter to a Connecticut association of Baptists that would change American judicial history and define the boundaries of religious freedom.
“I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ “ Jefferson wrote, quoting the First Amendment.
“Thus,” he continued, “building a
wall of separation between church and state.”
Although not part of the
Constitution, those concluding 10 words are considered by many Americans to be
authoritative on the subject. Jefferson’s letter celebrated religious liberty,
yet the courts have cited his “wall” to bar faith and its forms from government,
including schools, public parks and buildings.
The nation’s third president sought to reassure the Danbury Baptist Association of Connecticut, representatives of a minority denomination that refused to conform to the established Congregationalist and Episcopal churches. He actually intended his letter to convince the Baptists that a state-established church would not trample their beliefs.
Jefferson’s phrase did not enter the lexicon of constitutional law until 1879, when Supreme Court Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite quoted it in Reynolds v. United States, in which Mormon polygamist George Reynolds argued that the First Amendment allowed him to commit bigamy. The Supreme Court used the wall metaphor to explain that the Constitution was not meant to support specific Mormon practices.
In 1947, Justice Hugo L. Black resurrected “the wall of separation between church and state” in writing for the majority in Everson v. Board of Education, a New Jersey case asking whether the state should subsidize bus service for Catholic children in parochial schools.
“That wall must be kept high and impregnable,” Justice Black wrote. “We could not approve the slightest breach.”
The high court nevertheless upheld the state subsidy. This infuriated many Baptists, who traditionally have been among the strongest supporters of separation of church and state. They regarded the decision as favoring Catholics.
In 1947, Joseph Dawson, executive secretary of the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs, founded Protestants and Other Americans United for the Separation of Church and State.
More than 50 years later, with the named shortened to Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the organization campaigns from its Capitol Hill offices against what it views as entanglements of religion and government.
Beliefs versus policy
Americans United prevented the Rev. Pat Robertson’s Virginia Beach-based Christian graduate school, Regent University, from receiving $30 million from the sale of state construction bonds.
One of the group’s several complaints last year to the Internal Revenue Service cited a pastoral letter from the Catholic bishop of Colorado Springs, in which he urged Catholics to vote for pro-life candidates. Other complaints targeted rallies in Pennsylvania and Ohio churches for Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry.
Americans United vigorously protested when Congress and Mr. Bush intervened in hopes of preventing the starvation death of Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged Florida woman whose plight focused the nation’s attention on end-of-life issues before her death March 31.
Even so, the group’s executive director, the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, a minister with the United Church of Christ, among the most liberal Protestant denominations, maintains genial relations with conservatives. For four years, Mr. Lynn was co-host, with conservative commentator Oliver North, of a show on the Christian radio network Salem Communications. He is on the board of the American Civil Liberties Union and a regular analyst on Fox News.
“I do have very, very traditional religious beliefs,” Mr. Lynn says. “Many people are surprised by that. That is something that’s very much a part of who I am, but that shouldn’t be a part of what government is.”
Mr. Lynn is not easily painted as an “anti-Christian soldier.” Government bans on abortion first galvanized him. As a freshman at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa., in the late 1960s, he discovered that his roommate had taken a girlfriend out of the country to terminate her pregnancy.
“All of a sudden, I realized that religious groups had now dictated what rights a woman has to make an intimate moral decision on her own,” Mr. Lynn says. “And that was what triggered me, worrying about what damage it does for our country’s fabric to have religious decisions guide a country’s policy.”
Mr. Lynn took issue with references to God and faith in Mr. Bush’s inaugural ceremony and address in January and with the fact that only Christian clergymen participated.
“An event that is billed as a celebration for the entire nation should include everyone, even those who profess no faith,” he says. “This inaugural sent a message that in order to be truly American, you must also be religious.”
Mr. Lynn took umbrage at remarks that the president had made a week earlier in an Oval Office interview with editors and reporters of The Washington Times.
“I don’t see how you can be president without a relationship with the Lord,” Mr. Bush said, discussing the role of his personal faith in his public office.
“It offended many people because it seemed to suggest that as a matter of principle ... he thought he really couldn’t be president, he couldn’t imagine a person who was Muslim or Jewish who didn’t have the Christian Lord as his leader,” Mr. Lynn said Jan. 17 on “MSNBC Reports.”
Another guest on the show, Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, teased Mr. Lynn.
Mr. Bush’s comment “didn’t offend
three-quarters to 80 to 90 percent of Americans,” Mr. Land said. “Barry Lynn is
in an extreme secularist minority and he’s running around with his hair on
fire, and nobody’s noticing.”
Hollywood glitz
Television and film producer Norman Lear, together with Barbara Jordan, the former Democratic congresswoman from Texas, founded People for the American Way in 1981. Their purpose, according to their mission statement, was “to counter the growing clout and divisive message of right-wing televangelists, including Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and Jimmy Swaggart.”
Mr. Lear hired lawyer and lobbyist Anthony Podesta — whose brother, John, would become President Clinton’s chief of staff — as the founding president. The group, based in Southern California, made TV specials to spread its message as well as to fight efforts to return prayer to public schools and remove the theory of evolution from biology textbooks.
Hollywood celebrities were enlisted as board members, among them actor Alec Baldwin and songwriter Marilyn Bergman. The board also drew from the religious left, including the Rev. Robert Drinan, a Georgetown University professor and former Massachusetts congressman. President Ralph G. Neas, who declined to comment for this article, has identified himself as a Catholic.
“We have a different vision of religious freedom; we just don’t want the government pushing it,” says Elliot Mincberg, the group’s vice president and legal director. “We think when it comes to religious free exercise, the Constitution says the government should get out of the way.”
David Horowitz, who edits the
idiosyncratic conservative Web site frontpagemag.com and is a former leftist,
insists that People for the American Way “was organized as an anti-Christian
group.”
“On their Web site, they smear the [Christian] religious right,” Mr. Horowitz says. “Why not the Jewish right? Why not the Muslim right?”
“Right Wing Watch” on www.pfaw.org does take note of some secular groups, but conservative Christians are the prime targets.
Mr. Mincberg lists three conservative Jewish organizations as troublesome: Toward Tradition, Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations and Agudath Israel of America.
“We’ve done plenty of battle with them as well,” he says, “but it’s the Christian right that’s been out there much more aggressively.”
Focus on the Family founder James Dobson is viewed as a major menace.
“If you had to pick one person who has the most power and influence nationally, you might pick him,” Mr. Mincberg says.
People for the American Way criticized Mr. Robertson’s 1988 presidential run; opposed the Supreme Court nominations of Robert J. Bork in 1987 and Clarence Thomas in 1991; and sponsored a 1998 advertising campaign against President Clinton’s impeachment. More recently, it started a $5 million advertising campaign to pressure Senate Republicans to back down on reforms of filibuster rules that would hasten confirmation of Mr. Bush’s judicial nominees.
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit research group, the Lear organization’s political action committee gave $177,802 in the 2004 election cycle, 98 percent of it to Democratic candidates, party committees and leadership political action committees.
The group’s political action committee, Voters Alliance, donated a total of $42,500 to 18 Democratic House candidates and $54,000 to 15 Democratic Senate candidates. The largest contribution: $10,000 to the losing campaign of Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle.
‘Out of a hat’
The Freedom from Religion Foundation issued a press release
The release went on: “Religion is not the answer, it is probably the problem.”
And: “Prayer had its chance on September 11 and it failed.”
September 11 “should have clinched the idea this is a naturalistic universe,” group leader Mr. Barker says. “To stand by and do nothing makes God an accomplice. If He exists, why are we worshipping this monster?”
The fight against God and for abortion rights appear intertwined for Mr. Barker’s mother-in-law, Mrs. Gaylor. She was born in 1926 in Tomah, Wis. A biography posted at the group’s Web site, www.ffrf.org, says her mother died when she was 2 and her father, a farmer, found religion “embarrassing.” She graduated as an English major from University of Wisconsin in 1949 and was married the same year.
After raising four children, Mrs. Gaylor, in 1972, founded the Women’s Medical Fund, which has helped 14,000 poor women obtain abortions. In 1975, she published a book “Abortion Is a Blessing.”
A friend, Anne Treseder, identifies the motivation behind Mrs. Gaylor’s anti-religion activism in a letter dated that year: “She told me that after much soul-searching she had concluded that a woman’s right to reproductive freedom, and to basic civil rights, would never be realized as long as religious dogma played such a huge role in government policy.”
Mrs. Gaylor decided she needed the backing of an organization, so she began her foundation with three members in 1976.
“It was almost a joke,” says Mr. Barker, 55. “Anne just wanted to complain to the media about prayers in public meetings. People asked her what her group was. So she pulled the name out of a hat.”
Mrs. Gaylor’s husband and children helped her build the organization with offbeat publicity stunts. In 1983, the group posted pink-and-black signs on buses in Madison, Wis., calling the Bible “a grim fairy tale.”
‘Fighting back’
Besides eliminating public prayer at the state university, her successes include ending Good Friday’s status as an official state holiday in 1996; banning taxpayer subsidies (in the form of free Internet connections) to private schools in Wisconsin in 2001; and removing a Ten Commandments inscription from public land in Milwaukee in 2002.
Mr. Barker draws a distinction between the “public square,” which he defines as anything owned by the government, and the “public sphere,” where points of view are expressed.
“We think the government should be neutral — not advancing nor hindering religion — in the public square,” he says. “In the public sphere, we are free to express our points of view.”
Mr. Barker says he decided he was
an atheist in 1983, about 20 years after he says he became an evangelist at 15.
He began to question his faith, he says, after serving as a Quaker, independent
charismatic and Assemblies of God pastor and after performing missionary work
in Mexico.
Mr. Barker moved to Wisconsin to work for Mrs. Gaylor’s foundation, marrying Annie Laurie Gaylor in 1987 and joining the family cause. A piano player who has accompanied Pat Boone and other Christian artists, he now recasts old hymns in humanist terms with titles such as “You Can’t Win with Original Sin” and “God-Less America.”
Julaine Appling, executive director of the Family Research Institute in Madison, Wis., frequently contends with the Barker organization. Most of its energy is spent challenging Christians, Ms. Appling says.
“When they go after religion, they go after Christianity aggressively,” she says. “I don’t see them going after other religions.”
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By Julia Duin
Third of three parts.
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — The 5,200-pound slab of granite bearing a replica of the Ten Commandments rests in isolated splendor, set off by red and blue nylon sheets, on a flatbed truck parked on the front lawn of a church.
It’s not just any church, either. Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church is a signature evangelical congregation in southern Florida — its gleaming white, 303-foot steeple visible for miles around.
This same Ten Commandments monument was famously installed by Roy Moore, then chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, in the rotunda of the Judiciary Building in Montgomery in the summer of 2001.
Justice Moore’s monument is something of a piece de resistance in the renewed effort by Christians and others of faith to preserve the place of the Almighty in the public square.
On this February day, the Commandments in granite is a top attraction of the annual “Reclaiming America for Christ” conference that drew 942 faithful to Coral Ridge Presbyterian, also stop No. 130 on the monument’s nationwide tour. During breaks, conferees surround the slab, taking pictures and admiring the Bible verses and patriotic quotes inscribed on all four sides.
They recall the federal court order in 2003 that the monument be removed because it violates the Constitution’s prohibition “against the establishment of religion.” They talk about how fellow justices had to sue to remove the defiant Justice Moore — whom they consider a godly man — from office.
Inside the palm tree-ringed church, Richard Land, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission for the Southern Baptist Convention, preaches on “A God-Blessed America: How It Could Happen and What It Could Look Like.”
Loosed from its biblical moorings,
Mr. Land tells the assembly that “a pagan America” can only become home to a
legion of ills: harvests of fetal tissue and eggs from women’s bodies, marriage
redefined as any union with a variety of partners, single-parent families as
the norm, a low age of consent for child-adult sex, hard-core porn on
television.
Change will come when “a certain
percentage of American Christians known only to God humble themselves and
pray,” Mr. Land says. “He will lean over from heaven and pour out a blessing,
not only on Christians, but on non-Christian and Christian alike.”
In such a “God-blessed America,” he
says, streets and schools would be safe, divorce and illegitimate children
would be rare, and the elderly would live with their families and not in
nursing homes.
“In an American society that preaches Judeo-Christian values, rooted in biblical theology, not all will be Christian, but they can at least live according to [shared] values,” Mr. Land concludes.
The conference, designed to energize Christian activists, is the work of the Center for Reclaiming America (CRA), an eight-year-old public-policy group founded by Coral Ridge.
For two days, participants hear the words of rising stars in the politically active arm of American evangelicalism. One is the Rev. Rick Scarborough, former pastor of First Baptist Church in Pearland, Texas, and founder of Vision America, which seeks to involve pastors in public policy debates.
“All God is waiting for is for the church to show up,” Mr. Scarborough says, in a message that earns him a standing ovation.
Standing firm
This series has examined the legal battles against religion in public life waged by a network of organizations that includes humanists, atheists and radical feminists as well as liberal or secular Jews and Christians.
The clashes highlight a growing
determination of religious conservatives to stand firm for the Judeo-Christian
principles of the nation’s founding. People of faith are confronting the gathering
tide of secularism and a coarser culture in a variety of ways.
A loose coalition of evangelical Protestants and conservative Catholics worked for President Bush’s re-election in 11 battleground states, helping to make “moral values” a front-burner topic. Such activism is an essential part of any campaign to “reclaim” America “from those who have used the courts primarily to divorce America from her moral heritage,” CRA spokesman John Aman says.
“We won the White House on
pro-family values,” explains Gary Cass, the group’s new executive director,
“but we’re losing in the courts” on those same values.
But, he adds: “Since the late 1980s, the conservative movement has become more organized, better funded and more sophisticated. We’re not going away. There is too much at stake for our children and grandchildren.”
Mr. Cass, 48, moved to Fort Lauderdale last summer to add some muscle to the Center for Reclaiming America after pastoring churches in the San Diego area, serving on a school board there and recruiting evangelical Christians to run for office.
His group’s Web site, www.reclaimamerica.org, is loaded for action. A string of petitions ranges from “Defund Planned Parenthood” to “Free Our Churches.” The latter refers to a bill before Congress that would allow religious organizations — including pastors — to support or oppose political candidates without losing their tax-exempt status. Elsewhere are pleas for donations, lists of rallies and details on reaching Congress.
Another feature of the Web site is
“A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing,” an expose of the American Civil Liberties Union
illustrated by a photo of a snarling wolf. The copy describes ACLU-inspired
lawsuits and the organization’s “war against religion.”
The center last summer formed a lobbying group, Liberty’s Voice, to be based in Washington and go head to head with the ACLU in disputes over religious liberty.
The group hopes to put a policy activist in 12 regional offices across the country. Another goal is to field activists in every congressional district, beginning with the key Electoral College states of Florida and Ohio.
Mr. Cass says his goal this year is to raise $2 million, including $1.2 million to finance the lobbying group and three other initiatives: media outreach, an online campaign called National Grassroots Alliance and a think tank, the Strategic Institute.
‘Intellectually
engaged’
The Strategic Institute, with a staff of five analysts, expects to enter the debate on pornography, homosexual activism, the creation-evolution divide and “life” issues such as abortion and stem-cell research. First to sign on is Kelly Hollowell, 40, a Virginia Beach patent attorney who taught bioethics at the University of Richmond and Regent University in Virginia Beach.
The National Grassroots Alliance began in 2001 as a lobby for Senate confirmation of John Ashcroft as President Bush’s first attorney general. It now has an e-mail list of 400,000 names. Over two days in late February, 107,000 of them appeared on an online petition appealing for Florida Gov. Jeb Bush to save the life of Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged Florida woman who would die of starvation March 31 after her husband successfully sought to have her feeding tube removed.
R. Albert Mohler Jr. is doing his part from Louisville, Ky., as a leading American evangelical and president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
In the past three years, Mr. Mohler
dramatically increased his output of Internet and radio commentaries and
newspaper op-ed pieces on topics such as stem-cell research, same-sex
“marriage,” human cloning and the definition of the family.
“There was an entire constellation of issues that demanded attention,” Mr. Mohler, 45, says in an interview. “I wanted to mobilize Christians to become intellectually engaged and politically aware.”
Across the country, evangelicals are forming a potent alliance, says Diane Knippers, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, a watchdog group in Washington that monitors the religious left.
“Not just evangelicals, but Catholics, too, have some political clout and are getting respect,” Mrs. Knippers says. “Some people in the Democratic Party are having to pay attention to us. They’ve realized they’ve overlooked an important constituency. A lot of people think it’s wrong to have an entirely secularized society, with no room for acknowledging God.
“There’s a quiet determination to
draw the line,” she says. “The religious left is all smoke and mirrors. In
terms of the religious landscape right now, the initiative is ours.”
Christians in court
Modern Christian legal activism got its start in 1982, when a 36-year-old lawyer named John Whitehead founded the Rutherford Institute.
Mr. Whitehead’s initial investment was $200; he now operates with a $2.5 million annual budget. He asks a network of more than 500 lawyers to work pro bono on one case a year involving religious liberties.
“When I first started Rutherford, there was no cohesive litigation strategy,” Mr. Whitehead, now 58, says from his home in Charlottesville. “A lot of these Christian lawyers thought, ‘Would Jesus go file a lawsuit?’ and they were debating this issue constantly.
“My main emphasis was [that] even if you lose, litigation often has great education value.”
The Rutherford Institute gained new prominence in 1997, when it helped Paula Jones file a sexual-harassment and discrimination lawsuit against President Clinton.
Its recent court victories include decisions allowing prayer and other religious expression at the Alamo in Texas and permitting an 11-year-old Muslim girl to wear a head covering to an Oklahoma public school.
Another Virginia lawyer, Jay Sekulow of Virginia Beach, started going to court in the mid-’80s on behalf of religious liberty and the rights of Christians.
Today Mr. Sekulow, 48, is chief counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice, a DC-based constitutional law firm. The Rev. Pat Robertson, the religious broadcaster, founded the center in 1990 as a Christian answer to the ACLU.
Mr. Sekulow successfully argued several cases before the Supreme Court to protect the free speech of pro-life demonstrators and allow public school students to form Bible clubs on campus.
The pivotal shift in strategic
momentum for the center, Mr. Sekulow says, came when he stopped arguing from
the establishment clause of the First Amendment that he views as guaranteeing
free exercise of religion. He began arguing instead on free speech grounds
against religious discrimination.
Both lawyers say they are optimistic, though cautious, about the future of religious liberties.
The country is seeing a “growing, strong, serious movement” of Christians, Jews and Muslims who are open and uncompromising about their faith, Mr. Whitehead says, even if that could spark a “backlash” in the public square.
Mr. Sekulow says much rides on the
outcome of the “constitutional showdown” in the Senate over Democratic
filibustering of President Bush’s judicial nominees.
“This is going to impact every cultural issue we have right now because of the increased role the courts are taking,” Mr. Sekulow says. “The next month is going to be the key month.”
Joining forces
Separating church and state is in the interest of American pluralism, ACLU President Nadine Strossen argues. “Many people with deeply held religious beliefs don’t want the government to interfere by having government sponsorship,” she says in an interview.
“I fear the removal of the Judeo-Christian foundation of our society,” Dennis Prager, a conservative Jew, wrote in his syndicated column after the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted last May to remove a tiny cross from the county seal because the Southern California ACLU threatened to sue. “This is the real battle of our time, indeed the civil war of our time. The left wants America to become secular like Western Europe, not remain the Judeo-Christian country it has always been.”
Binyamin Jolkovsky, editor of the Web site JewishWorldReview.com, argues that the ACLU and other civil liberties groups act counter to Jewish principles in efforts they depict as protecting minority religions.
“Jews who take their Judaism seriously don’t want God taken out of the public square,” Mr. Jolkovsky says.
A loose network of conservative Protestant, Catholic and Jewish groups coalesced during the 2004 election season not only to send Mr. Bush back to the White House but to add Republican seats in both the House and Senate.
Shortly afterward, the Rev. Jerry Falwell, who founded the Moral Majority in 1979, announced that he would restart his pioneering organization to take on new challenges.
Mr. Falwell is re-entering the fray after a reawakening over the past decade of a theologically conservative movement in which religious groups quietly help, advise and emulate each other.
In early March, for instance, the Thomas More Law Center in Ann Arbor, Mich., a Catholic answer to the ACLU, sent out a fundraising letter that, with a few minor changes, could have come from the Center for Reclaiming America.
“America’s greatness lies in our Christian roots,” the letter reads. “To a great extent, the key to maintaining those Christian roots depends on the ability of the [Catholic] Church and our bishops to proclaim the truth on the great moral issues of our time. Our enemies at the ACLU and elsewhere know this as well.”
The move to counter the secular left also has the attention of Christian leaders who are black. Some brokered first-time alliances during the recent election season with white evangelicals over the issue of same-sex “marriage.”
The Rev. Harry Jackson of Hope Christian Church in Lanham joined other black pastors in Los Angeles in February to announce a “Black Contract With America on Moral Values,” with the goal of promoting socially conservative legislation.
“Some of us in the evangelical community have been painted as mean-spirited and inarticulate,” Mr. Jackson told 153 evangelical leaders during a March 10 gathering at the Hart Senate Office Building. Disarming such perceptions is simple, he said, adding: “The black community, with its needs, would team with the white evangelical community, with its power. We can change the way America thinks about religion.”
From his vantage point in
Louisville, Ky., Mr. Mohler agrees that more Americans are mobilizing against
secularism but also has a warning.
“Some on the left are negotiating a
way to use Christian language while keeping their liberal commitments,” he
says. “Evangelicals need to be more sophisticated in terms of looking past the
language to what proposals are being offered.”
Mr. Mohler intends to alert his audiences to such hidden hazards.
“Whether it’s too little or too
late is yet to be seen,” he says. “Millions of Americans are awakening to the
fact that something significant has happened in American society and unless
they do something, the very future of the American experiment is threatened.”
• Staff writer Jon Ward and researcher John Sopko contributed to this report.
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